...“White Privilege” Topic: McIntosh, Peggy “White Privilege” The author made use of the phenomenon of male privilege to bring out the fact that white privilege is similarly denied and unconsciously protected. By describing how male privilege has rooted in our society, and how men denied this phenomenon by avoiding acknowledgement of the issue, the author explained the development of white privilege. According to the author, whites are taught not to recognize their privileges. They are disciplined in a way that they are unable to recognize racism as something that puts them at an advantage while as a result, put others at a disadvantage. They do not realize the existence of unearned skin privilege and therefore do not feel the need to stop it. By identifying the daily experiences granted by their skin privilege, whites can help themselves to reveal this distorted culture. They have to recognize the problem before they can lessen it and work to end it. The most obvious privileges are that white individuals are assumed to be affluence, civilized and morally neutral. The white community is perceived as a group of people who interact pleasantly and peacefully and that their country enjoys a widely represented state and its people enjoy many of its freedom. These perceived and unearned privileges are not only preserved from other people, they are also used as weapons to oppress others. However, even if white individuals do not approve the way which white dominance has been...
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...acceptance, equality, benefits, this list is harder to label is it not? White Privilege is just as real as racism, but not as apparent. According the University of Dayton’s online dictionary, White Privilege is defined as, “a right, advantage, or immunity granted to or enjoyed by white persons beyond the common advantage of all others; an exemption in many particular cases from certain burdens or liabilities,” (“white privilege”). White Privilege is a subject rarely covered by educators due to the difficulty students’ have understanding it; therefore, resulting in a lack of awareness. White Privilege, unlike racism,...
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...Focus on Pellow's discussion of stakeholders and ways in which companies maneuver to obtain approval and minimize opposition. How do these strategies connect to "colonial" hierarchies and institutionalized racism? As Pellow states, the causes of environmental injustice referenced in the scholarly literature include institutional racism in housing… and the exclusion of low-income individuals and people of color from the dominant environmental movement” (Pellow, 13). And the environmental inequality is a social process involving and impacting many stakeholders, such as social movement organizations, private sector firms, the state, residents, and workers. “When different stakeholders struggle for access to valuable resources within the political economy, the benefits and costs of those resources become distributed unevenly” (Pellow, 14). Which means that, those stakeholders with less power suffers from environmental inequality, such as living and working under dangerous conditions; those stakeholders with greater power are able to deprive other stakeholders. Thus, workers and residents with minimal political power are the most vulnerable to environmental inequality. In order to obtain approval and minimize opposition, companies adopt many strategies, which are connected to "colonial" hierarchies and institutionalized racism. “Throughout history, one of the most effective ways of controlling a colony was to create hierarchies (or intensify existing ones) between social classes...
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...White privilege otherwise known as white skin privilege is a term for societal privileges that benefit white people in western countries beyond what is commonly experienced by the non-white people under the same social, political, or economic circumstances. These privileges are unearned and are distributed based on values of the dominant group, which in the west is white people. According to McIntosh and Lee, whites in a society considered culturally a part of the Western World enjoy advantages that non-whites do not experience. This leads to the controversy over whether or not White people should be able to enjoy these privileges. The term denotes both obvious and less obvious passive advantages that white persons may not recognize they have, which distinguishes it from overt bias or prejudice. These include cultural affirmations of one's own worth; presumed greater social status; and freedom to move, buy, work, play, and speak freely. The effects can be seen in professional, educational, and personal contexts. The concept of white privilege also implies the right to assume the universality of one's own experiences, marking others as different or exceptional while perceiving oneself as normal. Some critics argue that the term uses the concept of "whiteness" as a proxy for class or other social privilege or as a distraction from deeper underlying problems of inequality. Others argue that it is not that whiteness is a proxy but that many other social...
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...White Privilege Karie R. Shepherd Ivy Tech Community College Abstract The study of sociology allows us to understand the relationship between people and other cultures along with racial and ethnic inequality. As we define culture by a set of norms and values, we can also study how these cultures can often change over time and attitudes towards racial and ethnic groups. Several concepts, such as prejudice, racial profiling, and white privilege can often change the way we think or view other cultures. These topics become more relevant as you read Tim Wise’s article “White Swim in Racial Preference” and force us to think about how these ideas are put into practice. How this short piece makes us initially feel or perhaps react to other cultures can say a lot about who we are as a person and our level of understanding and tolerance towards groups other than our own. As we study sociology we seek to explain social behavior and human groups and how social relationships influence peoples behavior. We also seek to understand how those relationships and behaviors can change and develop over time. To study sociology we need to look at theoretical ideas such prejudice, racial profiling and white privilege to gain more understanding of how society functions as a whole. Tim Wise’s article “Whites Swim in Racial Preference” speaks to the ideas that white privilege very much exists in the country and how the University of Michigan’s affirmative action sanctions essentially did nothing...
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...White privilege is a topic that I never really heard about or grasped the concept of until I became older, maybe around late middle school or early high school years. Coming from a very small, railroad town in western Virginia, white privilege was not apparent or noticeable to me. It was not a topic that was commonly discussed unless you were taking a history class or another class that addressed racism in our country. Even in those classes, racism in our country was talked about, but rarely was the topic of white privilege and what it stands for brought up in discussion. My initial thoughts about white privilege are that I think it is unfair and morally wrong to have such a difference in treatment and opportunities between races. However, I’m not surprised that it exists in our world today and it doesn’t shock me to hear and see that white privilege is still embedded in the crevices of everything we do. We live in a world where racism is still...
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...Nathan Salupo Professor Vann WMST 231-001 Privilege For my mini paper topic I focused on privilege. Before enrolling in this class I had no idea of what privileges were, who had which privileges, how we get our privileges, and the role that privileges play in our everyday lives. The topic of privileges shows up in Shaw and Lee chapter two which is the main focus. Privilege as defined by Shaw and Lee is defined as “Advantages that people have by virtue of their status or position in society.” For example males have advantages that are inherent just because they are males that females do not have. In the case of my topic I focused mainly on the privilege that white people have over black people. In early August in Ferguson, Missouri, 18 year old Michael Brown, an unarmed African American male was shot multiple times and killed after a confrontation with a cop. The officer, Darren Wilson, drove by the boys walking in the road and told them to move onto the sidewalk. Wilson then reversed his car back to the two boys where there was an apparent confrontation as Wilson recognized Brown as a suspect for a convenience store robbery days prior and the boys split off running in separate directions. It later became known that the robbery was not the reasons for the encounter that led to Brown’s death. (Washington Post) When Brown was killed there was a public outcry for him because he had been unarmed and was shot by a white police officer, Darren Wilson after what witnesses...
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...Diane Baquedano Comm 315 Professor Puente 02/09/15 White Privilege Assignment My ethnicity is Central American. I am Costa Rican on my maternal side and Honduran on my paternal side. I am a first generation American on my maternal side because my mother was born in Costa Rica and moved to Los Angeles, California when she was ten years old. I am also a first generation on my paternal side as well because my father was born in Honduras and moved to this country later on in life. After reading the article by Michael Omi and Howard Winant, I learned how race was determined in the New World and how with time, the meaning of race changed by many factors such as science, social factors, and “common sense” qualities that people have when meeting people of a different race other than their own. In the New World, Europeans did not know what to call people that looked different than them and decided to outcast these people as “natives”, whom they believed may have not been human beings at all. This idea eventually led to slavery of non-whites. I agree with the authors about the idea of “racial etiquette” because race has become a part of who we are and what we go through every day. I know that being Hispanic has many stereotypes such as knowing how to cook well, speaking fluent Spanish, and most likely having Mexican ethnicity. In reality, none of these things define me but I already expect people to believe these ideas and perceptions about me. I also agree that these stereotypes...
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...The article “What is white privilege?” is written by Christine Emba, who explains what “white privilege” means, how it originated and how it manifests itself in America. It’s the level of societal advantage that comes with being seen as the norm in America, automatically conferred irrespective of wealth, gender, or other factors. According to Christine Emba, white privilege is: “life easing level of advantage, no matter what your wealth, gender, or any other status is and just being white in America, you are respected and assumed the best. It is a set of unearned assets that a white person in America can count on clashing in each day but to which they remain largely oblivious. The article “Making My Head Spin” talks about unearned privilege...
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...In the article White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Back Pack, Peggy McIntosh explains how white people have an unearned advantage in society solely due to the colour of their skin. The first important aspect of the article is that McIntosh argues that white people gain this privilege from the prejudice we attribute to people of colour. These ideas people have, put people of colour at a disadvantage in comparison to white people. The preconceived ideas people have about others affects their opinions causing them to undervalue people belonging to particular racial groups. Examples of these ideas are: that a certain race is uneducated, that a certain race is incapable performing certain tasks, or that one race is superior to another, also known as ethnocentrism. Since being white is an asset, it opens many doors for white people to rise to the top (McIntosh 8), while the undervalued people of colour are being held back. The fact that this happens and while people remain oblivious to white privilege, allows the current “taxonomy of privilege,” (McIntosh 9) to remain. Another important aspect of the article is that McIntosh acknowledges that all white people are not racist, but they “are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege,” (McIntosh 3). If they do not see white privilege as being real, they will be less inclined to agree that other races are not treated as fairly and they will also not attempt to do anything to help the under privileged groups. In society today...
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...1. Why is privilege often invisible? What categories of people are more and less likely to be aware of privilege? Privilege is often invisible because it’s so rooted in society that privileged people don’t realize it until they are the ones who are affected by it. Privileged people don’t realize that they are privileged. They think that it’s the regular way of life for them and others as well. The unprivileged people are highly aware of what privilege is because the privileged life is widely shown in the media and in their everyday lives. The categories of people that are more likely to be aware of privilege are working class and Black and Latino people. They often don’t get the same privileges as white people do. For example, a black person...
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...What White Privilege?!! Explanation! I'm not saying that privilege doesn't exist, I'm saying that as far as White Privilege goes in Modern Society, it is an anthill being transformed into a Mountain to push an agenda. I agree with Black Conservative and Economist Thomas Sowell when he argues that moral condemnation of discrimination doesn't automatically make it causally crucial, that having a majority in any society is a given, that the idea of a homogonized "white" group in society that is accepted and given privileges is erroneous. The theory of White Privilege fails to give an accurate definition/ analysis of barriers in society and the idea that large amounts of minorities or lagging majorities (in other countries) is due to a privilege ethnic or race group, is flawed and racist. First, while the idea of condemning discrimination against members of our species is important, it is by no means causally crucial. People forget sometimes that there are other races outside black and white when it comes to this subject. Once other races are involved you start getting different results, stats and causes. What about the difference in test scores for Japanese and Mexican American kids for example. In his essay Race, Culture and Equality, Mr. Sowell writes: Japanese and Mexican immigrants began arriving in California at about the same time and initially worked in very similar occupations as agricultural laborers. Yet a study of a school district in which their children...
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...understand the background of the author. I am a thirty-something white married male with two children. I was born in Florida, raised around the rural outskirts of the St. Louis area, moved to the “Big City” (inner-city) when newly married, and then fled to farm country when the inner-city crime became too much to bare to raise a family. When in the educational system, I wasn’t completely isolated from racial concerns. There was a black family with kids in grade school and a couple of black kids in high school. We thought we were high society, progressive “color-blind” people, though I can’t remember ever going to their houses, or seeing them outside of school, or even hanging out with them in school. My parents were not always the first to step up and claim “ain’t racist” but they would when pressed. They enjoyed a good joke or two or twenty and stereotypes a-plenty. It was when I went to college straight out of high school, and let a racist slang term slip amongst a group of my multicultural friends that I realized how much my parents tainted my worldview. That was my first realization and my first step towards being anti-racist. The purpose of this reflective paper is to examine what confrontations are experienced in recognizing institutionalized racism and white privilege. In order to understand today’s institutional racism, we must define. That is a difficult task and we were unable to fully define it amongst a group of my peers and that I turn to an authority such as Enid Lee. According...
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...I have never in my life have experienced white privilege. It is because I am a Chinese descent and I am also part of the minority in our population. Even though I have not experienced white privilege, but I have observed some of my white classmates to experience white privilege. I went to an elementary school that was pretty diverse, but there were some white children in the school. There were some in my class, and I remember there was a time where I had noticed white privilege had appeared. It happened in grade five, I was playing with one of the white girls and I think we were laughing at something that had offended one of our classmates even though we didn’t mean to. Then our teacher had called us out in the hall and started to give a lecture to us about why we should have not done that. My white classmate had made an excuse on why she did that and the teacher had let her back into the classroom without getting into trouble. I saw her made an excuse and I did the same thing thinking that I might get out of trouble. Instead I wasn’t off the hook and the teacher had to give me a light punishment. Then I have become aware that whatever trouble she made, she would be able to get out of it. While on the other hand, if I...
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...White Privilege and Colorism SOC 262 White Privilege and Colorism White privilege is a term that is used to refer to white people in America’s advantage over groups of people of color. It is said that whites have a bigger advantage, and many more perks over someone that is a non-white. White privilege makes a critical preference for white people and denies opportunities for people of color. Colorism is a form of discrimination that is based on the complexion of darker skinned Individuals, despite being of the same race (Banks, T. L., 1999). Colorism is giving privileges to lighter-skinned people of color in many different areas, such as income, education and marriage (Hunter, M., 2007). During the time of slavery, slave drivers would allow the slaves with a lighter complexion to work inside the home and live a more comfortable life. Those with darker skin complexion would work on the farms. Even today darker skinned individuals feel they are scrutinized because their skin is a darker complexion. My personal experiences of white privilege have been far and few. I sometimes find it easier to bond with individuals that are not of my own skin color. This may be a result of the environment I grew up in., which was a very diverse neighborhood. However, there have been a few situations where I have noticed I may be getting “white privilege.” For example, I have never been harassed or followed by any type of law enforcement based on the color of my skin. I have...
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